


I've Forgotten The Punchline

by rory_the_dragon, WalkOnThroughARedParade



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Blood Kink, Knife Kink, M/M, Polyamory, Trope Smashing Boyfriends, serial killers in love, violence kink, violent imagery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-15
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-07 15:16:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1121384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rory_the_dragon/pseuds/rory_the_dragon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/WalkOnThroughARedParade/pseuds/WalkOnThroughARedParade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens when two murderers walk into a cheap motel room and try to kill each other?</p><p>(Or: The Serial Killers In Love fic no-one asked for.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well this got out of hand like woah. It was originally a Serial Killers In Love fic, and ended up just being something to vent my frustration on. It is still very much a Serial Killers in Love fic, but not the one I intended.
> 
> Enjoy?
> 
> Originally posted on Tumblr

 

I’m going to tell you a joke.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

What happens when two murderers walk into a cheap motel room and try to kill each other…?

Peter’ll let you know when it ends.

 

***

 

Peter’s first kill isn’t something he likes to revisit.

It had been sloppy, messy, too rushed and on impulse. He was younger, stupider, convinced he knew everything and really knowing nothing.

He’d cried.

His second kill, though…that was a thing of beauty.

 

***

 

It goes like this: Peter’s jeans are tight and his hips are thin, and he walks into the club like he owns it. It’s a seedy place, the kind that doesn’t check ID’s or backrooms, and Peter throws back sticky drinks like water, lets men with wandering hands paw at him, dances wild under the strobe lights, pulls stumbling girls out into the alley with him.

It goes like this: He’s halfway to fucking some girl when he sees Henry, wide eyes and unsure hands, dancing, sees him looking back, and Peter _wants_.

It goes like this: Peter brings Henry back to his motel room, alcoholwarm and slurring, and fucks him, slow, into the mattress.

It _ends_ like this: Henry’s knife is at his throat and Peter is laughing, glitter-eyed and mad.

***

 

Okay, that’s a lie. The ending is the beginning.

Keep up now.

 

*** 

 

They leave town together, crammed into a stolen car, and laughing. Henry’s biting at his neck, his fingers playing with Peter’s shirt, good little boy façade dropped with his knife, and Peter barely gets them past the town limits before he pulls over.

Henry grins up at him from the backseat. “You know what they say,” He laughs, drags nails down Peter’s chest, angry red lines scoring.

“Like finds like, baby.”

And Peter kisses him hard enough to draw blood.

 

***

 

Their first is a young boy, huddled in an alley in the rain. Maybe a runaway. Maybe abandoned. Definitely lost.

Doesn’t matter either way, really. He’s a dead boy now

Peter watches from the shadows as Henry works, eyes open, head tilted, an angel in a downpour, and he sees the poor dead boy fall in love with chocolate eyes and a soft smile. Sees Henry cup his face, gentle, with one hand, slice his throat with other.

When Henry licks the blood of his knife, the poor dead boy choking at his feet, and grins…that’s when _Peter_ falls in love.

 

***

 

Oh, I’m sorry. What would you have preferred? Someone seedy? Someone with blood on his hands rather than tears? Did you want avenging angels? Beautiful and terrible?

I’m not sure how that makes it better.

They’re all bodies in the end.

 

***

 

Henry’s inside him, Peter’s head thrown back, blood on the hands they’ve got entwined, pushed down beside Henry’s head, and it’s four cities, five bodies, later ( _twins, they’ll get you every time_ ) when Peter groans out, “I’m going to kill you one day.” and comes harder than he has in years, stars behind his eyes.

 

***

 

"Not if I kill you first."

 

***

 

Do you get it yet?

Do you understand?

No?

Well, they’re going to have to scream louder, aren’t they?

 

***

 

Peter has a different technique.

He can make his face do whatever he wants it to, become the same bright-eyed and bushy-tailed do-gooder Henry can morph into like breathing and lead his prey into the dark, disguised.

But where’s the fun in _that_? When he can lean against bars, roll his hips on the dance floor and grin wicked at a sea of faces _desperate_ to be chosen. When he can offer them death and they come to it willingly.

Lambs to the fucking slaughter.

Peter slides a knife through the ribs of a man wrapped in leather - so good for hiding the blood - in the alleyway behind a club, fucks Henry wild in the bathroom stall, and they dance in the neon lights until the police arrive, sucking bruises into each other’s skin, Henry licking the blood off Peter’s hands.

***

_Where’s Emma_ _?_ _Regina?_

Are you asking that yet?

Well,  _what about them?_

Oh, sweetheart. Do you still think this has a happy ending? You really haven’t been paying attention, have you?

 

***

 

He killed Emma quickly, he killed Emma quietly, and he killed Emma first.

(First to die, give the girl a prize)

Regina, on the other hand…Well, it all comes back to Regina doesn’t it. Do you think sweet little Henry Mills would have become the vicious little killer he is if he didn't have the hand of his mother on his shoulder throughout childhood? If he didn't have her  _love?_

Now how, exactly,  _do_  you return the favour of a childhood of lies, of gaslighting and therapy?

Regina dies  _slow,_ spread over days, until Henry takes her hand, dresses her up pretty and leads her to a stool, a scarf of red hanging.

I’ll leave it to your imaginations, whether she jumped before the stool was kicked over.

 

***

 

Peter…Peter is sharp smiles and bright eyes, long legs and combat boots. Peter has cheekbones like knives edges and pointed teeth that he bares in the dark.

Peter looks dangerous.

Henry on the other hand is baby-faced, wide-eyed and soft along the edges. Henry looks like the kind of boy your daughter would bring home, who’d blush at holding her hand in front of you.

That’s the thing, isn’t it?

Of the two, Henry’s the scarier one.

 

***

 

Years later, the entire map and countless bodies between them, Henry and Peter will stand on a rooftop balcony and look out over the city. Henry will tip his head back onto Peter’s shoulder, grin against his neck.

"Still going to kill me?" He’ll ask,  _dare_.

And Peter will grin. “Not yet, love. You?”

"One day."

 

***

 

No, that can’t be it. It can’t end there. There has to be a reason, right? Something someone did to them? A spell? A curse? That has to be it.

Sure, I mean, if that’s what you want to think.

Whatever helps you sleep, I suppose.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They find him in an alley.

 

Okay, so there’s something I haven’t told you. Something about that rooftop years down the line. You know the one? Our two boys setting the world alight and watching the world burn?

Well, there’s another killer on that roof.

Wanna hear about him?

 

***

 

They find him in an alley, half-hidden by a dumpster, with blood on his hands and smeared all up one side of his face, dripping from his eyelashes and spilling in scarlet trails down the curve of his cheekbone.

The only thing prettier than this blood stained boy is the sharp way he then glances up, eyes glinting and hostile, like a wolf caught in a corner; the glint of white teeth matched by the crimson glint of the knife in his hand, a snarl pulling at his lips; the way the boy beneath his hands slumps silently to the ground, toppling forward to hit his calves the moment before he settles.

Their blood stained boy curls away from them, out of the light, sinking into the shadows with an ease they both know in their bones; and it’s Henry who steps forward, hands raised and a deceptively gentle smile on his face. They don’t need to speak to know they both want this one.

They’re not sure whether to kill or keep, but they want him. All to themselves.

 

***

 

What?

_Surprised?_

That’s Henry and Peter. _Live_ for surprising people like you.

Now hush up and listen.

 

***

 

“Why are you doing this?”

Felix’s voice is still a surprise every time they hear it, a strange mixture of rasping depths and high, sweet tones that work the same way Henry’s soft face does.

He still has his kill’s blood on his face, let Henry tug his hood up to hide it while they stole away into his and Peter’s motel room, and Peter drags his thumb down over the crust of it, grinning when Felix flinches away; only to fall back into Henry’s chest, trapped between them.

Like this, caught between them, he is almost as pretty as he was back in the alley.

“Because you’re interesting.” Henry confides in a whisper, lips at his ear and eyes fixed on Peter’s.

For the briefest moment, Henry is unreadable; Peter can’t tell what he’s thinking, whether he wants to kill the pretty thing trapped between them or keep him forever.

But then it’s gone, and Henry’s pulling quietly at the buttons on Felix’s shirt, unbuttoning them slowly.

Felix seems to try and curl away from the touch for a moment, eyes shuttering; before slowly relaxing beneath Henry’s touch, eyes steady on Peter’s face. Peter follows the dried blood on his face carefully, touching the arch of his cheekbone and then his eyelashes.

“How many? How many people have you killed?” Felix’s eyes brighten, and something in Peter’s chest thrills with it, recognising the look; from Henry’s eyes, from his own in the mirror.

“Nine.” He offers, quiet like a secret but thrumming with pride, and when Henry gently rubs the heel of his hand against his crotch he presses his hips into it, eyelashes fluttering but never closing.

He hadn’t closed his eyes yet; hadn’t taken his eyes off both of them for a moment, the closest he’d come to doing so being the way he was leaning against Henry now.

Their blood stained little wolf boy had known what they were the moment he’d clapped eyes on them, and thought he’d let them secret him away into their bed he didn’t trust them for a moment.

Peter carefully peels his shirt open, damp blood making it stick to his skin, and Henry immediately runs his hands across the exposed skin, staining his fingers before lifting them to his mouth, sucking them clean when Felix turns his head to watch.

Felix’s breath hitches, eyes darkening; and the grin that spreads across Peter’s face is wicked.

 

***

 

It begins.

It began in a blacksmith’s workshop, Peter’s father at his feet and the door on its hinges.

It began with adoption papers and lipstick smiles, a greyhound to Boston and two bodies left in a mansion house.

It began in a forest.

It began again in that dirty motel room, come-stained sheets and Peter’s laugh, Henry’s knife.

And it begins again, for the final time, here.

I did say to keep up now, didn't I?

 

***

 

Peter has him on his hands and knees, head bowed to the covers while Henry rides out the aftershocks of having had Felix’s mouth on him, rolled off to the side and panting into the sheets even as he watches the blonde boy; and he slides his hands down Felix’s back, touching at the scars crossing his skin gently before he drags his fingertips over the swell of his ass cheeks, tantalisingly close to where he is wet and open and waiting.

He only pauses, achingly close to pressing into Felix, when he feels the sting of the very tip of a knife press to the inside of his thigh, and watches as Felix’s head turns just enough to meet his eye.

“Do you know where the major arteries are in a person’s thigh?” He asks, voice rough with how he’d moaned around Henry, let him fuck his throat in short bursts between catching his hips and holding them down.

Peter laughs, startled; and beside them, a delighted grin spread across Henry’s face.

 

***

 

Thing about Felix is this;

He’s as fucked up as the both of them.

That’s it, really.

 

***

 

“How do you think you’re going to kill me?” Felix is panting, chest heaving as he presses up against Peter, he and Henry caught around him with blood still on their hands and staining all their lips from the man they just killed, coaxed off the street with a smile and a look from Felix.

It’s the third they’ve done together, the fifth since Felix joined them, since they claimed him and then watched him kill twice, so pretty and pleased to have their blood on his face.

Peter’s still marvelling at how well he’s settled in with him and Henry.

“I don’t quite know. Maybe while we’re fucking. Maybe before I kill Henry, maybe after; I may even kill you both at the same time.” Felix purrs against his throat, presses harder against him; and Peter laughs, head dropping back against Henry’s shoulder.

“And you, Felix? How are you going to kill me?” Henry’s breath hitches behind him, and he mouths quietly at the side of Peter’s neck while Felix speaks, voice soft and thoughtful.

“When I kill you, you’ll be awake, and you’ll have a knife in your hand. I’ll kill you slow, so you bleed out on bed sheets, and I’ll keep your last breath for myself.” He hums low in his throat, a counterpoint to the groan Peter lets out, grinding his hips against him.

“You’ll look so pretty dying, Peter.” Peter laughs again, voice rough, and turns into the drag of Felix’s mouth on his cheek, breathing words against his lips.

“As pretty as you do killing, love?” Felix’s grin is all teeth, and he bites at Peter’s mouth before moving to kiss Henry, lick the blood from his lips.

Henry’s voice is an eager whisper, and Peter can feel how hard he is behind him, rocking his hips forward.

“And me, Felix? I want you both to be awake when I kill you. I want your blood on my hands, but  _only_ my hands. No one else deserves it; your blood’s too good for motel sheets.” Felix hums and rests his forehead against Henry’s, grinding his hips against Peter’s; and Peter grins at his response.

“Spoilers, Mills. I won’t have you see me coming.”

He’s figured out that of the three of them, Henry is the most dangerous.

Peter’s laughter doesn’t end until the police sirens start outside, and they disappear out the back door.

 

***

 

So lets go back to that rooftop shall we?

Those years, those bodies, that map always stretching, the police always on their heels, just behind swinging motel doors, just at the edge of their tyre-tracks, and there they are, on that rooftop.

Henry’s head on Peter’s shoulder, grinning, _daring_ , and he gets his answer, stalks his way to Felix, leant against the wall and staring down at their newest city, silent.

“What about you?” Henry will murmur in the shell of Felix’s ear, _biting_ , and Felix will hiss a breath. “Still going to kill us?”

“I will if you will.”

And Henry will grin. “Perfect.”

 

***

 

And it is.

For them anyway.

Oh yeah, _that’s_ the punchline.


End file.
